


Epilogue

by Donna_Immaculata, ElDiablito_SF



Series: The Fabulous Adventures in Immortality of the Vampire Aramis and the Man Who Named the Mountain, Volume IV [8]
Category: DUMAS Alexandre - Works, Les Trois Mousquetaires | The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-18
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-23 06:59:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8318305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donna_Immaculata/pseuds/Donna_Immaculata, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElDiablito_SF/pseuds/ElDiablito_SF
Summary: Even our epilogue has 2 chapters:  we have no chill!  And neither do they.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Favourite_alias](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Favourite_alias/gifts).



> Happy birthday! We were originally planning on posting this all together but decided to give you a preview of Chapter 1 for your birthday because you're such good Audience <3
> 
> Also: hai Audience! We missed you!

After the events of Transylvania, only one path was clear to me. My place was not among mankind, nor among the dark powers of Carpathia. I rode until I saw the sea and set sail for Olympus, leaving Aramis behind.

I may have also gotten better at lying over the years.

I may have gotten better at many things. It has been an eventful century, don’t you agree?

There were airplanes and the atomic bomb. There was Alcatraz and the moving pictures. Penicillin, vaccines, genetics. The internet. We had gone through at least six dogs, three cats, and a python. Never another parrot, sadly.

I did go back to Olympus once, back in the 1960’s, I cannot recall the exact year since every summer is the summer of love in our household. The celestial canopy above the mountain opened up and swallowed me whole, and there I stood, among my sleeping brethren. A god among gods.

I saw him laid out in full regalia, as if Achilles upon his bier, his golden helmet pressed over the black curls framing his olive-skinned face. I brushed my fingers along the curve of his cheek and watched wakefulness flicker into his features as he opened his eyes.

“When will we have no more wars and discord?” Ares asked with a smile that still echoed with the din that Aramis had slain over a hundred years prior.

“Even as you sleep, brother, humanity finds more and more creative ways of obliterating itself,” I replied.

“I did not like the last one,” he frowned. 

No one had liked the last war.

“You aren’t the only God of War on the planet,” I responded with a press of my fingers around his. “We don’t control the world anymore.”

“There used to be honor in war,” he sighed and attempted to sit up. “Do you still remember Achilles?”

“I remember everything,” I said.

“Good,” he smiled. “That’s good.”

My Father, he too slept, seated atop his golden throne. I left him there without a second look as I descended back into the realm of the mortals, where my beloved awaited me.

They had moved Alex’s remains from Villers-Cotterêts to the Pantheon in Paris in 2002, that I did remember, interring him alongside with his friend and our old neighbor Monsieur Hugo. He had been carried there in State, by four soldiers dressed in Musketeer uniforms (inaccurate, as Aramis hastened to point out, but lavish enough to garner Porthos’ approval). Blue velvet draped across his coffin was emblazoned with the words that have pursued us since the 1840’s.

_Tous pour un, un pour tous._

“Dead for one a hundred and thirty years and still a drama queen,” Aramis remarked casting me a sly look through his sunglasses, which he enjoyed wearing indoors as much as outdoors, blaming this habit on “sensitive corneas.”

“You’re just jealous, chyortik,” I pressed his fingers and pushed my shoulder into his own as we stood in the dark hallway beneath the Pantheon.

“Please, I beg you,” Porthos sighed next to us, “forbear fucking on top of my son’s tomb. I would not wish him to return a revenant!”

We found ourselves laughing, forcing Porthos to extract a vow out of me that I begrudgingly honored.

I remember walking out into the light of day, our hair and clothes battered by the winds of late November. Winter was already in the air and I observed Aramis putting on his fine leather gloves with the same precision he used when scrubbing in for his surgeries. 

A flash of plaid caught my eyes, hovering just in the periphery of my vision. A teenage girl, in a Catholic school uniform, short skirts and long white stockings, long hair pulled back in a thick ponytail. Her lips parted and shut as she chewed a piece of pink gum, and she winked at me. Before I could properly recoil, her lips moved, and in her nymphette smile I recognized the Rohan nymph.

“ _Viens, Marie!_ ” someone had called and she disappeared from my line of sight like a mist scattered by the wind. I could not wait to see whom she was going to become this time.

“Come, my friends!” Porthos’ voice drew me back as his arms wrapped around us both. “We have reservations at Les Deux Magots, where we shall celebrate my son’s immortality!”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is what happened. True story.

**Split, September 2016**

“I think we should go to Salona,” Aramis had said, his fingers lazily scrolling down the touch pad of his laptop. “It had not been excavated yet when we were last in Dalmatia.” I had been staring out the window at the deep blue hues of the Adriatic. Somewhere in the distance, the many bells of Split had echoed each other announcing high noon. “Earth to Professor Thunderson?”

“Mmm?”

“You are supposed to be on an archeological sabbatical, no?”

Aramis rose and walked over to the windowsill, where I had been seated, my hand rolling a ripened mango between my fingers. Dalmatia had changed since last we were here. I avoided the eyesores of the Tito-era architecture and turned my eyes towards my beloved instead.

“I can only be bothered to glamour the Dean of your department so many times before you lose your job.” His hand brushed softly against my cheekbone and I leaned into his touch. 

“I can’t be bothered with office hours, Aramis. You know how horny young college girls are.”

“Even at Berkeley?”

“Don’t laugh, flittermouse. They are voracious and gunning for ‘extra credit.’ And they all have these… iPhones now! And they take ‘selfies!’ I need to retire.”

“You mean quit.”

“I have tenure.”

“Hm, yes, and you’re welcome for that.” His lips brushed against my forehead in a soft benediction.

“You were saying about Salona?” I asked, setting the mango aside and focusing my attentions back where they belonged.

“Google Maps has conveniently shown me a backdoor way that we can take to the ruins. Come on,” he pulled me off the windowsill and handed me my sunglasses. “It's a short drive. We’ll have Grimley pack a picnic basket. It will be romantic: I know how hard you get around Roman ruins.” A smirk spread across his lips that I immediately wanted to chew off.

“That does sound nice, kitten.”

We had left the car under the shade of a chestnut and stepped out into the sunlight, facing the grey walls of the fourth century necropolis. In the distance, across the open field of green grass peppered with ancient stones, a group of archeologists conducted active excavations. Aside from them, the site appeared all but deserted as we walked the perimeter that had once been the wall of a bustling Roman city. 

“Well, it’s not Pompeii,” Aramis shrugged, shielding his eyes from the rays of the sun as they descended down on us. I felt very exposed standing there, among the stones of the abandoned city of Salona, the birthplace of Diocletian, the site of some of the earliest Christian churches after his death. The Earth heaved a sigh beneath my feet, ready to unburden from the summer heat that had plagued it for months. The energy here felt resentful.

“Let’s walk down that path,” I pointed out a well-trodden walkway, leading away from the open field and the ongoing excavations. The signs along the road promised us an “Amphitheater” as well as something called the “Kapljuć.”

To the right, we passed a trench filled with rows of faceless sarcophagi. Aramis raised an eyebrow at me and I glanced over at Grimley, who customary to his ways, quietly followed a few steps behind, carrying the picnic basket and a tiny parasol that provided shade only to himself. I shook my head at my beloved who suppressed a short laugh.

“Maybe on the way back then?” he purred into my ear. I kissed him and pulled him along the path until we stood before an iron grating thrown open, and beyond it, a sign telling us that we had found the Basilica of the Five Martyrs.

“Oh, this is excellent, Aramis!” I pulled him in behind me and gestured for Grimley to stand guard at the small gate. “This must be the burial ground of your early Christian martyrs! I can finally pay proper homage.”

“You seem particularly bloodthirsty all of a sudden, sweet Discord,” Aramis smirked from beneath his sunglasses. 

“Do you know who these fools were? Four of them were part of Diocletian's praetorian guard,” I explained, guiding him towards the gaping graves beneath the non-existent floor of the basilica. Each one still held a sarcophagus firmly in its maw. “Antiochianus, Gaianus, Paulinianus, and Telius,” I said, pointing at each sarcophagus in turn. “They had been sent to arrest the Bishop Domnius, your dear St. Domnius, but instead of obeying their emperor’s command, they refused. Well, what was Diocletian to do?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Aramis whispered, leaning forward against my chest until our noses almost touched. “What would… _Hadrian_ do?” And then his fingers alighted underneath my sack and gently squeezed.

“I suppose the name of ‘Five Martyrs’ gives the game away?” I exhaled and moved to capture his lips with mine.

“But who’s the fifth martyr?”

“I don’t care,” I pronounced and jumped down into one of the opened graves. “Care to join me?” I held out my hand to aid him but he had already tiptoed lightly onto the top of the heavy sarcophagus and dove inside through the sizeable hole in the stone.

“Cozy!” he called out from inside.

“Get out of there, you little lunatic.”

“It’s empty,” he pronounced with a pout, his head popping out like a most adorable gopher.

“Were you expecting to find a martyr?”

“I was merely getting excited about the defiling you were contemplating on achieving.”

I pulled him back up and then slammed him down onto the stone slab of a martyr’s final resting place. Then I proceeded to lick a long stripe down his neck and across his breastbone as I unbuttoned his linen shirt.

“This is profoundly disrespectful,” he sighed and I felt his legs wrap around me. “You _know_ that. We’re technically inside a church, on consecrated ground, and… Ah!” My mouth had traveled low enough to press against the swell of his jeans. Even through the heavy fabric, the scent and taste of his arousal was unmistakable and I let my teeth graze along the underside of his growing erection as I slowly unzipped his fly. “You deviant!”

“You love this, chyortik. You love paying your respects to the early Christian martyrs.”

I moaned into the heat of his underwear, letting the wetness of my saliva mingle with the early evidence of his own excitement. His fingers lay firmly in my hair, not pulling but digging into the thick curls as if to steady himself as I took the tip of his cock into my mouth and rolled my tongue around the head, savoring his unique flavor.

“Wait… Stop!” he suddenly yanked my head up.

“Don’t be such a prude, chyortik,” I frowned.

“I’m not being a prude… Just. _Look_.” He pointed behind me and, with a grimace of annoyance, I forced myself to shift so I could turn around. “We’re not alone.”

Indeed, we weren’t. Just on the other side of what was left of the main wall of the Basilica, stood two women, their faces obscured by hats and sunglasses. One of them was holding what appeared to be a small notebook and scribbling in it with the speed I have not seen since Alex had been alive. The other, calmly pointed her phone at us and smiled.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” I asked, jumping off the defiled sarcophagus.

“Peeing,” one of the women said. “There was nowhere else to pee and... Anyways, you are really not in any position to be judging!”

“Let me eat them,” Aramis hissed behind me.

“Calm down, flittermouse. You don’t even eat women!” I whispered back. “I’m going to need you to delete those photos,” I said, climbing out of the grave and approaching the two intruders. Damn that Grimley! What the hell did we leave him on guard for? _This?_

“Aww really?” The other woman didn’t sound convinced. “But these are practically artistic. This is true Art and Thespianism!”

“I feel incredibly objectified,” Aramis pronounced.

“Well, you’re beautiful, you must be used to that,” the first smartass responded.

“Let me at least glamour them,” Aramis breathed into my ear.

“You urinated on the five martyrs?” I asked, for some reason more amused by the situation than it actually called for. 

“Look, it was a dire situation!”

“Who the hell _are_ you, people?” Aramis threw up his hands, and then quickly remembered to do up his fly.

“I’m Donna and this is El,” the photographer introduced them. “And we four obviously have a lot in common. We also love ancient history and gay sex.”

I looked at Aramis. Aramis looked back at me. Neither one of us seemed capable of producing a cogent come back to such effrontery.

“Wanna hang out?”

THE END


End file.
